The Beginners (12 page)
Authors: Rebecca Wolff
“Why, they buried them again, of course! There’s a huge cemetery out on Route Seven for all the people who were dug up from the towns. They brought the stones and everything! Some of my family is buried there.”
Raquel looked up at us, from where she had been gently digging in the mucky bottom with her toes. The heat of the day had turned the tops of her shoulders, the tops of her cheeks, her nose, all a peachy color. Her eyes radiated a silty green, the color of the mud. I felt as if a trap had snapped shut somewhere behind them. “I believe,” she said softly, “that some of my family is buried there, too.”
WE LEFT THE RESERVOIR with our heads full of new information. Now, it all made sense, these visitors, these
rootless cosmopolites—
a phrase that had seeped out of my history textbook and into my consciousness. Raquel was doing research. Raquel was writing a book! This was a book that had begun, she told us, as we stood in our hushed circle around the swaying lily pads, as her doctoral study on the history of the New England witch trials—her proposed fellowship project—but which had evolved into much more than that, when she and Theo found Wick. Now the book had taken up a more personal, singular set of concerns. It seemed that Raquel could trace her ancestry along a dramatic timeline of tragic conclusions: first, to the scene of the famous atrocities in Salem, where at least one of the innocent women hung as witches was her direct ancestor; and then to our own flooded valley, where long ago yet another of her unfortunate ancestors, with the unlikely surname of Goode, had been persecuted in the name of righteousness. And then later, those that remained were forced out of their homes and displaced, dispossessed—a final debasement. So the book had grown from a simple, potentially dry, potentially superfluous historical treatment of a much-documented set of mistakes to a memoir of a family curse, which would not incidentally include revolutions both cultural and industrial.
rootless cosmopolites—
a phrase that had seeped out of my history textbook and into my consciousness. Raquel was doing research. Raquel was writing a book! This was a book that had begun, she told us, as we stood in our hushed circle around the swaying lily pads, as her doctoral study on the history of the New England witch trials—her proposed fellowship project—but which had evolved into much more than that, when she and Theo found Wick. Now the book had taken up a more personal, singular set of concerns. It seemed that Raquel could trace her ancestry along a dramatic timeline of tragic conclusions: first, to the scene of the famous atrocities in Salem, where at least one of the innocent women hung as witches was her direct ancestor; and then to our own flooded valley, where long ago yet another of her unfortunate ancestors, with the unlikely surname of Goode, had been persecuted in the name of righteousness. And then later, those that remained were forced out of their homes and displaced, dispossessed—a final debasement. So the book had grown from a simple, potentially dry, potentially superfluous historical treatment of a much-documented set of mistakes to a memoir of a family curse, which would not incidentally include revolutions both cultural and industrial.
This was the coda to the story she had told us that day in the rain, in her cozy bedroom, and to the lie she had blithely told that first day of conversation, in her kitchen. Now it all made sense, the presence of Raquel and Theo in Wick—
what they were doing here
—and this, to me, I can confess now, was something of a relief. I had longed for mystery, and excitement, and even confusion, if it came naturally along with these, but now that I’d tasted of them, in the form of this strange pair. . . . Once it became clear that they needed to come back east, to give up their pioneering dream for the sake of Theo’s family obligation, Theo, she said, had been all too happy to support her in this year of research and writing with the fellowship money from the university. They would stay in Wick and here together be both responsible and productive at the same time: Theo a good son; Raquel a good scholar. And they might even be so productive as to produce a child, a child of Wick.
what they were doing here
—and this, to me, I can confess now, was something of a relief. I had longed for mystery, and excitement, and even confusion, if it came naturally along with these, but now that I’d tasted of them, in the form of this strange pair. . . . Once it became clear that they needed to come back east, to give up their pioneering dream for the sake of Theo’s family obligation, Theo, she said, had been all too happy to support her in this year of research and writing with the fellowship money from the university. They would stay in Wick and here together be both responsible and productive at the same time: Theo a good son; Raquel a good scholar. And they might even be so productive as to produce a child, a child of Wick.
IT HAD GROWN COOLER, and I turned toward the shore. Theo sat up as if on cue and reached for his T-shirt. Ominous silver clouds rolled above the tips of the tall pines that ringed the reservoir, and Cherry shivered a little and said, “I’ve got to get back soon.” I noticed that she hadn’t offered any comment on Raquel’s surprising admission, and later that night on the phone she querulously observed that Raquel had made her feel like an idiot, duping her into an enthusiastic recounting of something about which Raquel obviously knew much more than she did.
Our ride home was silent.
I HAVE NOT YET mentioned that I never swim. It’s the kind of prohibition that stands in the way of group activities, but if one is steadfast and consistent, after a while it comes to seem natural enough.
I never swim:
not in daylight, but especially not at night, when there is no hope of seeing the bottom, of moving away from whatever dead body or body part or soft, rotted remnant one might be about to bump into with a bare foot or hand. There, in the dark, exposure is complete: one’s skin to the black water; whatever is in the water to one’s skin.
I never swim:
not in daylight, but especially not at night, when there is no hope of seeing the bottom, of moving away from whatever dead body or body part or soft, rotted remnant one might be about to bump into with a bare foot or hand. There, in the dark, exposure is complete: one’s skin to the black water; whatever is in the water to one’s skin.
13.
I
t was out of habit that I asked her, and I felt something quite close to relief when Cherry made an excuse. Rather than coming over to see the Motherwells with me the next day, she would go back down to “the res,” as she put it, with Randy and some of the other kids from school. “I’m just going to go swimming at the res with Randy and a few kids from school” is exactly what she said, and I noted that she used the slang that we never would have used before.
t was out of habit that I asked her, and I felt something quite close to relief when Cherry made an excuse. Rather than coming over to see the Motherwells with me the next day, she would go back down to “the res,” as she put it, with Randy and some of the other kids from school. “I’m just going to go swimming at the res with Randy and a few kids from school” is exactly what she said, and I noted that she used the slang that we never would have used before.
But though I was relieved to be free of the encumbrance of Cherry—my rival, it now seems necessary to say—I didn’t feel ready to go alone. Knocking at the door, calling into the cool, shady interior, the subsequent immersion. Almost, but not quite. I needed an intermediary, a buffer. I thought I’d go to the mill and spend an hour or two alone with my thoughts.
I lay on my back and stared at the sky, the sun graciously veiling itself behind a white-hot cloud whose edges showed purple with a coming storm. The kids at the reservoir would be doubly wet, extra-wet with rain.
The kids in my town were louts. Winter or summer, they liked nothing better than to take their parents’ cars up into the hills, park, get so drunk they’d fall asleep in the back, then wake up gagging on their own vomit. Or some of them died, not having woken up in time; about once every ten years one of them did this. Jack did this, late one October night when I was eleven. He was eighteen, and never any older.
THINK OF WAKING UP to the stoppage of your own breath, waking up not breathing, having breathed your last with your unconscious mind churning in cooperation with the involuntary actions of the body, which function so smoothly unless blocked or offended by some unforeseen obstacle, such as regurgitated food and alcohol. Think of the unspeakable grief of your surviving family members.
Raquel spoke, all the time, in language calculated to impress. It was huge, and smelled of the future. She told me, every day, in so many little ways, that someday my dealings with the world would include making choices, on a scale I had never previously conceived of. “It’s all a matter of what you conceive of.” She said that to me on many different occasions. Often just out of the blue, the way someone else might sigh without explanation, leaving you wondering if it was something you had done.
Did I understand even half of all that came into my ears in this time? Like I have said, I was fifteen, one year ahead of myself at the high school, and of an introspective nature, but I had not yet developed a vocabulary with which to discuss myself with myself. I recorded my impressions not in a diary but as notes taken internally, permanently. (Raquel later said, on the subject of diaries, that they were lonely. “There’s no one to talk to in there.” Occasionally she could be pithy and lighthearted about something she felt deeply. “Felt deeply?!” she would exclaim, if she had heard me say that. “Why, I never felt anything deeply in my whole life.”)
Raquel was a foreign language and I, her student, fully immersed. I did not understand so much as absorb, like meat in a marinade. It got so they would forget I was there sometimes—or at least Theo did, to my chagrin, as his notice had risen to a place of paramount importance; I’m not sure Raquel could ever be accused of ignoring her audience—and the conversation might follow an intimate path, or even, on rare occasion, fall into the comfort of silence. Or what I perceived as comfort: Raquel never failed to squirm, and look around, and smile painfully in both our directions, as if apologizing repeatedly, silently, for her share of the abyss we had fallen into. “Apologize silently?” I can hear her incredulous tone. “I don’t speak unless I speak out loud. You can be sure that when I am silent, I am silent throughout. If I had an interior monologue, or dialogue, for that matter, it would indicate that there was some content preexisting the moment at which I open my mouth.”
Then Theo asks her, “Well, who are you? Who are you now? And now? And now? Now?” He prods her side with his index finger, none too gently.
She slaps his hand away, shuts him up entirely. “An intellectual exercise, like everything else.”
As the rehearsal of this conversation was for me. This was one piece of business they would not conduct in my presence. Perhaps they never conducted it at all, in front of me or each other or Yahweh. I had, it seems clear, only imagined it. High above the mill’s turret, the cloud released its cargo, fat drops heralding a downpour, and I made my way home in the rain.
14.
More July
I
t went on for days. Wick was sodden, air cooling with the expression of moisture. One late afternoon I tied a sweatshirt around my waist and left my room, where I had been ensconced for hours with something called, beguilingly,
The Uses of Enchantment,
which I’d pounced on at the library for its title but been disappointed to find was a book about, of all things, fairy tales, how they prepare one, psychologically speaking, for the witches and curses, amputations and stuntings, of adult life.
t went on for days. Wick was sodden, air cooling with the expression of moisture. One late afternoon I tied a sweatshirt around my waist and left my room, where I had been ensconced for hours with something called, beguilingly,
The Uses of Enchantment,
which I’d pounced on at the library for its title but been disappointed to find was a book about, of all things, fairy tales, how they prepare one, psychologically speaking, for the witches and curses, amputations and stuntings, of adult life.
“Ginger!” My father hailed me from the living room, where he sat in his chair with the newspaper, a bottle of beer sweating on a coaster on the side table. I halted, caught at the moment of liftoff. “Ginger, what’s on your agenda for the evening? An important meeting to attend?” My father often liked to kid about what he perceived as my advanced maturity, my seriousness, my gravity. I stood in the doorway and gazed into the gloom; he had only one light on to read by. “Your mother’s in Jack’s room doing some bookkeeping . . . go say goodbye at least, honey.” She had set up her home office on Jack’s desk. I think she just wanted a reason to sit in there and look at his belongings: posters and books and records, his trumpet, his prizewinning senior history project—a scale model of the Shift River valley, pre-flood. Toys he had not had time to shed from his teenaged self. I bet she was glad to have all of that.
“Hi, sweetie. Where are you off to?” She sat peering at the monitor, bills spread out before her. I told her Cherry’s house, and her frame relaxed; it did not seem to occur to her that I might be lying.
“You know, before you go, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about something, Ginger. It’ll just take a minute. Sit down, honey.” She smoothed her hand over Jack’s bedspread. “It’s something . . . I’ve always known this would come up, because you and Cherry are so close and she’s older, and I think now’s the time. Sit down.” An order. I sat on Jack’s bed.
“Now, I know Cherry’s starting to really date boys, and get involved with all that, and I thought I should find out whether you need any protection. Birth control—you know what I mean, right?” Bang. My mother coolly cast herself in the role of my protector without any sense of irony, though I felt keenly the distinction between the provision of a latex condom and any true parental supervision. With an equal measure of coolness I told her that no, I did not need any protection.
No, Mom, I’m okay.
I think I blushed, or flushed, and thus indicated to her my persistent innocence and the native delicacy that made any further conversation on the subject undesirable. I kissed her quickly on her cool cheek and slipped away, down the dark hall and out the door into a day that held a premature hint of fall.
No, Mom, I’m okay.
I think I blushed, or flushed, and thus indicated to her my persistent innocence and the native delicacy that made any further conversation on the subject undesirable. I kissed her quickly on her cool cheek and slipped away, down the dark hall and out the door into a day that held a premature hint of fall.
DOES IT SEEM OBVIOUS to you, too, that I required protection? How embarrassing. I have mentioned before that I felt myself at this time to be ageless, and I would posit that feeling for all children. A child does not perceive herself as such—not in the way that adults grow ever more concerned with their status, their chronos, as it shows itself ever more clearly on their bodies and in the shortening days ahead. A child has no perspective on age, and consequently cannot abide or bear the presuppositions of others, of observers, about how this or that is supposed to make them feel, because they are “just a child.” Violations, intimations, reprobations, invasions. These are labels adults place on experience. This places you in a difficult, almost impossible situation. For it really is your job—you who are grown—to protect the children. For they know not how they feel. They know not how they ought to feel about anything. You must feel it for me.
JACK HAD PLAYED TRUMPET, in martial lockstep in the marching band, at school, but at home he liked to close the door to his room, put on one of my dad’s old jazz records, plug in his headphones, and follow along with the soloist. His sound alternated: strong and smooth; short blasts of stridency; occasional fluttering arpeggios, flights of fluty articulation. I was not allowed in, usually, but once or twice I sat on his bed and watched, and was amazed at his mirthful frown, his plugged-up mouth, by how he seemed to be talking through the instrument, not just blowing air into it. It was an instrument of expression, just like a mouth, a tongue, a palate, its language one of feeling, purely wordless. It made me feel proud.
I had been proud on his graduation day, when Cherry and I pressed together, seated on the bleacher between my parents in our sundresses, a fine June day. Jack marched around the playing field with the band; then a short while later bounded up onstage to accept a special prize for his project on Wick’s early days as “A Town of Steep Vicissitudes.”
A pre–Revolutionary War site of great prosperity, Wick was in 1762 host to the nation’s first market fair!
(A much-reduced version persists in the parking lot of the grocery store every third Sunday, weather permitting.)
Wick and its several neighboring towns, Hammerstead, Shadleigh, and Morrow, used the bountiful force of their many streams to power early milling and manufacturing: wood, fabric, cannonballs when cannonballs were required. The invention of the steam engine carried our products far and wide, and the mills labored overtime to fill orders, putting the area’s first wave of immigrants to work doing so. Many decades of contentment ensued. But by the 1930s competition and diversification in these markets had reduced our perceived efficiency, and jobs began to drain out of the valley. Meanwhile, water began to drain in, as a diabolical plan that had been afoot in the Massachusetts legislature for many years was set into final, cataclysmic motion, in a huge and bitterly opposed landgrab. The case went as far as the Supreme Court, but just as the land had originally been grabbed from the Ramapaquet Nation, by white settlers, now the land was grabbed, cleared, deforested, manipulated; rivers and tributaries diverted, redirected, then finally, over a number of years—
inhuman, literally detached from any one human decision or approval or appraisal, the unstopped trickle of man-made disaster
—blocked with tons of granite, a dam built, the valley irreversibly flooded. Wick alone, on high ground above the insensitively named Ramapack Reservoir, remained, and remains to this day, and we its rueful citizens.
A pre–Revolutionary War site of great prosperity, Wick was in 1762 host to the nation’s first market fair!
(A much-reduced version persists in the parking lot of the grocery store every third Sunday, weather permitting.)
Wick and its several neighboring towns, Hammerstead, Shadleigh, and Morrow, used the bountiful force of their many streams to power early milling and manufacturing: wood, fabric, cannonballs when cannonballs were required. The invention of the steam engine carried our products far and wide, and the mills labored overtime to fill orders, putting the area’s first wave of immigrants to work doing so. Many decades of contentment ensued. But by the 1930s competition and diversification in these markets had reduced our perceived efficiency, and jobs began to drain out of the valley. Meanwhile, water began to drain in, as a diabolical plan that had been afoot in the Massachusetts legislature for many years was set into final, cataclysmic motion, in a huge and bitterly opposed landgrab. The case went as far as the Supreme Court, but just as the land had originally been grabbed from the Ramapaquet Nation, by white settlers, now the land was grabbed, cleared, deforested, manipulated; rivers and tributaries diverted, redirected, then finally, over a number of years—
inhuman, literally detached from any one human decision or approval or appraisal, the unstopped trickle of man-made disaster
—blocked with tons of granite, a dam built, the valley irreversibly flooded. Wick alone, on high ground above the insensitively named Ramapack Reservoir, remained, and remains to this day, and we its rueful citizens.
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